hard drive query

[terence friel]

i have a 60gb hard drive on my system
specs xp3200 processor, 60gb hd,windows xp pro,512mbs mem,
the question is,Can i stick a 200gb hard drive in and get full use of it as a secondary drive,ie, Slave?
or will i be limited to 120gb.

[Midknyte]

it depends on your motherboard bios. make sure it is updated. check the manufacturer's website to see if it will fully support the 200GB drives.

[ukulele]

You can always make two partitions and use the entire drive that way if the bios is limited to less then 200GB.

[Midknyte]

that wouldn't make a difference. the bios is limited by the drive size, not partition size.

[ukulele]

Well I learn something new everyday. I knew there was bios limitations but I assumed that was actually a problem with the controller's limitations which a bios update would fix.

I just installed a 160gb drive that way on an older MB. Bios saw the drive as 137gb. The drive came with a ata133 controller card to over come the 137gb limit with the ata100 controller but the user wanted two partitions of 80gb each and there was no problem at all installing the drive that way with the old controller. He gave me the extra controller because the driver disk was damaged and he didn't want to waste anymore time when it worked anyway with the old controller.